27,656 research outputs found
DPVis: Visual Analytics with Hidden Markov Models for Disease Progression Pathways
Clinical researchers use disease progression models to understand patient
status and characterize progression patterns from longitudinal health records.
One approach for disease progression modeling is to describe patient status
using a small number of states that represent distinctive distributions over a
set of observed measures. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and its variants are a
class of models that both discover these states and make inferences of health
states for patients. Despite the advantages of using the algorithms for
discovering interesting patterns, it still remains challenging for medical
experts to interpret model outputs, understand complex modeling parameters, and
clinically make sense of the patterns. To tackle these problems, we conducted a
design study with clinical scientists, statisticians, and visualization
experts, with the goal to investigate disease progression pathways of chronic
diseases, namely type 1 diabetes (T1D), Huntington's disease, Parkinson's
disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). As a result, we
introduce DPVis which seamlessly integrates model parameters and outcomes of
HMMs into interpretable and interactive visualizations. In this study, we
demonstrate that DPVis is successful in evaluating disease progression models,
visually summarizing disease states, interactively exploring disease
progression patterns, and building, analyzing, and comparing clinically
relevant patient subgroups.Comment: to appear at IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphic
Portinari: A Data Exploration Tool to Personalize Cervical Cancer Screening
Socio-technical systems play an important role in public health screening
programs to prevent cancer. Cervical cancer incidence has significantly
decreased in countries that developed systems for organized screening engaging
medical practitioners, laboratories and patients. The system automatically
identifies individuals at risk of developing the disease and invites them for a
screening exam or a follow-up exam conducted by medical professionals. A triage
algorithm in the system aims to reduce unnecessary screening exams for
individuals at low-risk while detecting and treating individuals at high-risk.
Despite the general success of screening, the triage algorithm is a
one-size-fits all approach that is not personalized to a patient. This can
easily be observed in historical data from screening exams. Often patients rely
on personal factors to determine that they are either at high risk or not at
risk at all and take action at their own discretion. Can exploring patient
trajectories help hypothesize personal factors leading to their decisions? We
present Portinari, a data exploration tool to query and visualize future
trajectories of patients who have undergone a specific sequence of screening
exams. The web-based tool contains (a) a visual query interface (b) a backend
graph database of events in patients' lives (c) trajectory visualization using
sankey diagrams. We use Portinari to explore diverse trajectories of patients
following the Norwegian triage algorithm. The trajectories demonstrated
variable degrees of adherence to the triage algorithm and allowed
epidemiologists to hypothesize about the possible causes.Comment: Conference paper published at ICSE 2017 Buenos Aires, at the Software
Engineering in Society Track. 10 pages, 5 figure
How we got Here? A Methodology to Study the Evolution of Economies
This paper proposes a methodology to analyze the evolution of the economic development of countries. Our approach is based upon the definition of temporal trajectories of countries in a common bidimensional space yielded by a High-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD). These trajectories are defined with respect to a pre-selected set of macroeconomic indicators and are appropriate for comparison purposes. To show the applicability of the proposed methodology we have used data from the World Bank concerning the economic and financial development of EU-27 over a 14-year span, that goes from 1995 to 2008. Based on this data we group the EU-27 state members according to their economic development, which is indicated by the position of their trajectories on the plane. We further perform individual analyses of the trajectories of Luxembourg, Germany and Portugal, aiming to both detect and interpret trends and changes in these economies. The results show that this methodology is of importance for economic studies, since it can help the design, monitoring and evaluation of specific economic policies, as well as provide an overview of the evolution of the studied economic phenomenon.European Union, HOSVD, International Comparisons, Temporal Trajectories
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